Google’s new SearchWiki

As you may have noticed there are a couple of changes made to Google's search results page (serp) and the new "SearchWiki" allows users to customise their search results by re-ranking, adding, removing and even commenting on search results.

It seems pretty straight forward, there are two new icons, a little arrow (
- promote) and a cross (
- remove) and they let users move relevant sites around in the search results. This will however only affect your own searches, but it does lend itself to being a great tool for sharing knowledge and user experiences. So if you had trouble with a certain website you could simply add a comment and warn prospective users about the issues you had and to read the comments keep an eye out for "See all notes for this
SearchWiki" link.

According to the official Google blog : "This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly
dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them
in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of
SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated
much of our learnings into this release. We are constantly striving to
improve our users' search experience, and this is yet another step
along the way."

Will this in time start to affect how Google ranks sites? So let's say that we have a site that ranks at # 8 and our biggest competition ranks at # 6, but more people complain about their site, whether it is about bugs, slow loading time, pretty much whatever the case may be it will be very interesting to see if Google take users' customisations into account. What are your thoughts?